


'Tis Pity She's A Whore

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Series: To Die as Lovers May [3]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Cisswap, F/F, Gender Issues, Lestat No, Origin Stories, Rule 63, The Author Regrets Everything, The Author Regrets Nothing, Whole Buckets of Darkness, madonna/whore complex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 15:47:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7690426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestat and Louisa's lives put them on a track to meet one another. The collision was life-altering (life-ending), but many changes began long before.<br/>This is where they come from; this is where they are going.<br/>Or, Lestat believes she gives Louisa a choice neither of them ever had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Tis Pity She's A Whore

**Author's Note:**

> This story is really fucked-up, but warning could be spoilery. Skip to the end for specific content warnings, or proceed at your own risk.

Lestat was not a wanted child. She bore it in the indifference of her name, meant for the role she was expected to fill, and the shabbiness of her clothes; she dragged it along behind her, a dead thing as heavy as the carcasses she dropped at her father’s feet. He made sure never to curse her for failing to fetch a bride price while his mouth was full. They’d go hungry without her, and well she knew it. 

“Damnable brat,” her father called her, when she strolled home in breeches with a satisfied grin on her face. He could shake her and demand to know about her monthly courses, but he couldn’t stop her. Once he beat her black and blue, her books long in the fire but her pride still hot and stung. “I’ll not have you whelping another pack of mouths to feed.” She held her aching stomach, wishing she had the energy to spit on his shoe. But still. Never her fingers. Never her legs. Nothing that would stop the hunt.

The choke of responsibility around her neck was better than the cage the fortunate girls woke up to find themselves in – fat with child and shut away, lucky if they died in the blood and shit and sick of childbirth; unlucky if they lived, to start the whole process over again under some fat, sweating hog who left bruises and sometimes just left, when a comelier prize came along.

Her mother wanted none of them, not Lestat or her father or brothers. Only her books. If Lestat took any pride in what others would call her womanhood, it was due to the nearness it allowed her to her mother. When she was small she raised up on her toes to look at that secretive printed ink; her mother hadn’t the patience for teaching, but Lestat had touched the pages with a certain reverential awe, and her heart hurt still to think of them. She’d given that same touch when her mother begged her to go to Paris, city of vices and dreadful things.

“Deny them the satisfaction of catching you here,” her mother had ordered her, and Lestat had given her best promise. Her mother loved her – if Lestat hadn’t known that she couldn’t have borne what came after – but solitude was her most beloved companion.  

From her mother Lestat learned to hide, and it was only in the arms of blessed conversation that she found solace. Nicola kept her going. Their long nights hidden away together under the thick, costly blankets on Nicola’s bed, protected by the assumption that their intimacy was only companionable, was a north star on the darkest nights. And eventually, that light led them to Paris. It was meant to be their future.

A lifetime of being needed meant Lestat knew how very much she relied on her dearest love. Nothing gave her greater joy than coming home to their little hovel and stretching out on the bed they shared, doing her best to look irresistible so that just a little misery might lift from that woeful brow.

Nicola had spoken of nothing but scandal since they’d come, the shriek of her bow across violin strings a stab aimed at all the world, daring them to be shocked by her stockingless legs and the loose flowing shirts that hinted at her grander attributes. Lestat reveled in the privilege of pressing her nose to the sharp space between Nicola’s shoulder blades, so deeply entranced by the rumble of words under skin that she often forgot the sounds carried meaning.

“Did you mean it?” The violinist asked again, running a comb in vain through the fine wisps of hair that had survived her angry butchering.

“Hmm?” She always meant what she said, even the things that were impossible. So long as Nicola believed them, it was enough. 

“When you said you’d sell yourself if you had to.” 

“I’m sure I’d be the most talented of cutthroats.” Lestat sat up and took the brush from Nicola’s hands, setting to work on that fine dark silk with her fingers.

“That would show them, wouldn’t it.” Nicola was in one of her moods again. “Back home, thinking of us plunged to the lowest of the low. The filth they all spit on.”

“I spent what passed for my virtue years ago,” Lestat reminded her, kissing the crook of her lover’s neck. “I’m sure they thought me riddled with the pox long before I left.” 

“So it was only talk.” 

“Isn’t that our preoccupation?” Lestat teased, trying to lift the mood.

“All of it? Even your grand plans?” The bitter look in those dark eyes cut a raw stripe across Lestat’s heart.

“They’ve set me to play Vittoria in our next performance.” Lestat puffed her chest out, proud less of the role and more of the coin it would bring. In truth, she far preferred the breeches roles – though her voice was unsuited for Lelio’s music. 

“I hadn’t thought the Commedia was the height of your aspirations.” 

It wasn’t. Lestat longed to do straight plays, ply her trade on the finest stages where she could play the handsome lover and not worry about her soprano’s voice. She wilted a little, reminding herself that Nicki was only spurring her on. It was how they’d gotten out of Paris. “Some wealthy talent will be taken with me any day,” she boasted. “And you.” Fame and fortune. That’s what they’d promised one another. 

“Respectable.” Nicki spat. “Bourgeois.” 

Lestat was no revolutionary. Her grand plans encompassed only this little room and the woman in her bed. She’d give up even the adoring crowds for that (or so she told herself). Nicki was so often miserable, unable to leave her ideals as a matter of drunken conversation, unable to wait for the audience that would finally adore her as Lestat did. It was unbearable to both of them. 

“I would do it,” she whispered as she molded herself against Nicki’s back, protecting her as best she could.

“Prove it.” 

Lestat could never resist a challenge.

She stole a dress from the theater, La Signora’s dress bunched up on one side to show off a stockinged thigh. The bodice sagged around her meager breasts, the tradeoff for her athletic build, and she hurriedly stuffed a few scraps of cast-off cloth in to bolster the illusion. She’d sat in this very dressing room while Musette applied careful pots of paint and powder to her face, plying the senior actress for secrets of the trade. It made it easy to mimic the movements now, to trace her lips in bright bloody red and powder the sharp juts of her cheekbones. 

The face in the mirror was utterly unlike her, far from the wild-haired “natural beauty” of Auvergne. The thought made her proud – a few adjustments by her own hand and she could walk the streets unrecognized, make herself anew. It was only acting in a different form. That thought banished the sickly unease in the pit of her stomach as she crept out of the theater, sticking to the shadowed alleys and seedy corners. That’s what the role called for. 

She fancied that her common courtesan was made for higher things, plunged from the height of favor at the King’s right hand in court (Nicki would like that, to hear of the wealthy fallen down into the muck with the rest of them). She was noble and proud, bold in her protestations of worth even as she was ravished by all manner of filth. 

A meaty hand squeezed her hip, and the illusion wavered. “How much?” 

He smelled of sourness and sweat – a day laborer out in the evening. The same sort Nicki would call one of their brethren, on another night. But now she was even lower than that.

Down in the muck. She’d left her fur coat in the dressing room.

“Show some manners.” She slapped his hand away, meaning to be playful; she had the bearing of nobility after all, in this dark – 

Those hands slammed her against the brick, sending a shock through her back that turned into the smallest tremor. He slobbered against her neck, dragging grease from an alehouse up her fine stolen stockings to the clasp of her garter. When she pushed against him he laughed and stuffed a coin into her bodice.

True panic welled in her then; she was no stranger to sex, loving and languid and furtive and sweating; but the mere feeling of this man rutting against her leg, reaching down to undo the flies of his trousers, left her sick. She saw the snows of the wilderness in front of her, and all manner of beasts – one of which had escaped and followed her here to Paris. 

When she came to he lay unconscious at her feet, a small pool of blood trickling from him, and she couldn’t say if she was shaking with fear or rage. There was a tear, she realized, in her costume. “How dare you,” she growled, and pressed her fine heeled shoe against the back of his neck. She didn’t check to see if he was breathing.

As she walked back to their apartment, hastily shoved back into her breeches and coat, she was certain she felt eyes on her back. She fancied her failed john was following her, and spun around in the night to face him – to show him who Lestat de Lioncourt was, and how she should be treated. But there was no one there. 

“You’re late,” Nicola complained when she entered. And then, when she looked, “what in Hell happened to you?”

Lestat threw the coin onto the little desk where Nicki sat, trying to take pride in her sore back and the round red marks around her breasts. “I fell from grace,” she whispered, heart stuttering at the way her beloved’s gaze grew heavy and intent. 

“I knew it,” she said as she devoured Lestat’s lips, her mouth sour with the taste of alcohol; her hands rough and demanding, prodding mercilessly at Lestat’s new aches. “I knew you would.”

“For you,” Lestat managed to gasp. She hadn’t bathed, but the raw, gritty smell only seemed to drive her love on harder. “Anything for you.” 

When Nicola lay beside her, insensate and exhausted, Lestat drew her knees up to her chest and stared at the coin on the table. In it she could see eyes, watching her. Whispering to her. 

_ Wolfkiller _ . 

The next night, Musette tore the theater upside down demanding to know what had become of her costume. Lestat shrugged with the rest of them. It was true, in a way, that she didn’t know. The little pile of ash behind the theater had long since blown away.

Two nights after that she died, Nicola none the wiser as Lestat was snatched from their bed. Magnus had held her down against moldering velvet sheets and laughed at what she’d been taught to fear; she felt the tearing of her throat, the reality of those fears given new form, and no amount of struggling would win her freedom.

Lestat’s death came for her as it did everyone, while she was alone and surrounded by the fetid stink of corpses. She clawed her way out wild-eyed and ravening for blood, and swore never to visit that fear on another. 

She failed. 

 

~ *~*~*~

 

Louisa loved Paul when he was born.

Paul had blue eyes, pure as summer-sky or (so Louisa was informed) the ocean over which their family had sailed. Big and blue and watchful always, fixed upon her solemnly from the time he slipped bloody from Mother’s womb.

Mother fell ill, after; he was her last, and late at that. Louisa at ten (and eleven, and twelve, and) often had the nursing of him, when the slaves were busy.

Paul had fair hair, yellow as gold or (so Louisa heard) wheat and corn in fields not turned over to indigo or tobacco. Soft and fine and shining, when she combed and tied it with a ribbon soon lost in his chases after her.

Louisa always did love the sight of such eyes, such hair. Perhaps, she sometimes thought, the blame was hers, for that.

For didn’t she fall beneath Lestat’s vibrancy? Didn’t she adore Claude’s little hand in hers?

Paul grew fast, strapping and pleasing to their father when he was home. At five, when Father disappeared (died of too much, too much drink and vice Mother said, but he’d always been kind to Louisa, showed her how to keep the books--) her brother was already over half Louisa’s height.

Perhaps there was the blame; no living father to guide the boy. No one close, really, with the cousins all still in France and Mother overcome, and Adelaide too young for such burdens.

At fifteen, Louisa knew how to keep the books, and her father’s lawyer was happy to allow her more than her share of latitude. His body was warm, near hers, his fingers over hers on the pens marking out numbers in red and black smooth and calloused.

Paul was her chaperone, then, for they were  _ his _ interests in which she acted. Paul, five and six and seven, safeguarded her from nervous little Monsieur Favreau.

And later, from all the others, too.

From all the suitors, the ones who would take her and ‘beget upon’ her and secure the future so much more easily than the work, the  _ endless _ work of figuring and budgeting and passing off her thoughts as fancies, persuading them that this or that direction after next harvest would be best for  _ Paul. _

Monsieur Freniere was less than pleased, the year she made her debut, to see her always in the presence of her young brother. And the year after, and after that.

Monsieur Freniere wanted things, with his dark eyes and dark hair and dark whispers, his venturing hand luckily interrupted but paired with an utterly, utterly sincere proposal.

He wanted her money, the money she’d ensured remained. He wanted her plantation, not hers at all but Paul’s, not-so-little Paul nine and ten and twelve. He wanted to touch her, as she cast her eyes down and looked through lashes at his five pretty sisters.

Paul adored her, thought she’d hung the moon, and she did love him, too. Loved more than resented, as her years went on, and he grew more pious and priggish and took to disapproving even her girlish connections, her woman friends, even as she approached spinsterhood.

She still loved him when he forbade her visit Babette, when he moved her from the townhouse to the plantation where he was having a pointless, profligate oratory built. She still loved him when he said he’d need the money they lived on to go to Paris and fight atheism.

She still loved him when he proposed to strip her and Adelaide and Mother bare and leave them in the streets, everything she’d fought for given over to his burning, useless convictions--

She still loved him when he moved to strip her bare.

When he reached out with his big hands, blond hair falling free, blue eyes blazing.

She still loved him when she was twenty-five and he was fifteen, when his so very large body pressed against hers, crushed her against a wall, a couch--questing towards a bed. When he touched more intimately than anyone else had ever done, when he whispered to her of sainthood and redemption and God’s promised allowance even as he reached fingers soft from no work, nails too long from the same, up, up into that place where blood poured from. When he tried his best to spread her and use her, when his parts (parts she’d seen at his  _ birth _ , naked as Adam, oh God forgive--) surged against her and left a wetness--

When she screamed and no one came. When she shoved him off her in terror and kept on, kept shoving, pushed and pushed and suddenly he was flying, flying like an angel, falling like a Devil down down down

And when his head had the wrong shape.

And she loved him still, then, at twenty-five and fifteen and no more.

 

~*~*~*~

 

So wonderfully  _ savage, _ this unchaperoned beauty Lestat had found. Louisa bore a purely primitive disgrace; such deep wrongness had been hidden in her lovely plantation home.

In ‘mourning’ for her brother--Lestat was frankly envious she’d never thought to take so direct a route in removing Augustin from her life. (Then again, if Augustin had ever attempted what flashes of memory indicated Dear Sainted Paul had, surely Lestat would have bestirred herself to some similar course of action.)

Positively perverse, those fragmentary images. More so, with the piquant film of guilt overlaying them instead of rightful triumph.

He’d been a strapping boy, Paul had, big for his age and always trailing along from his delicate 10-years-elder sister’s apron strings right up until the moment he tugged her in by them. His paws had left remarkably large bruises at wrist and hip while he muttered in her ear about Amnon and Tamar in 2nd Samuel; Abraham and Sarah; blood and Egyptian kings and the daughters of Lot. He’d approved of her struggle;  God, he’d said, would forgive her a rape, temptation though she was.

(On that point, at least, he and Lestat agreed. Tempting Louisa should carry no blame with or without  _ God’s _ involvement.)

So sad, how the boy had ‘fallen’; so unfortunate, the women left to fend for themselves without a perverted adolescent fanatic to ‘protect’ their interests. So awful, how the eldest--the rare beauty--was yet unmarried at 25 and driven to hysterics by seeing the death. If  _ only _ some man had wed her earlier, gotten her out before the unfortunate incident.

And if Lestat’s decision to leave her adored one on the townhouse’s porch swing seemed a cruelty, well. Behold the spectacle: Louisa insensate, half-curled on her side with a hand over her eyes, glorious hair her mantle. The ruptured cords of her stays trailed down her back, and her lovely, stained dress had been so hastily replaced as to barely hide her attributes, her full bosom and slim waist and oozing nethers. And she bled below (a little cut inside from a glassy nail did the trick.) Cuts, too, to her throat, parallel and obvious (knife wounds, naturally, from whatever monster had done the deed.) Surely she couldn’t appear more blameless than  _ this; _ all blame fell squarely on whoever’d failed to protect her. (And the man who’d fucked her would be telling no tales, not with his essence flushing Lestat’s cheeks and his corpse feeding the catfishes.)

Like a bouquet of white roses trodden in a carriage accident, so she seemed in the lightening night. And Lestat couldn’t  _ wait _ to have her again.

 

~ *~*~*~

 

Louisa's second-to-last dawn broke with the sound of screaming from Danielle, the maid-of-all-work. She roused only a little as slaves carried her inside, trying their best to preserve her modesty with the half-finished shawl her mother had left in the parlor. The ball of yarn trailed after, bobbing down the hall like a thing more alive than Louisa.

For she felt it; a deadly heaviness in her limbs. A nausea in her belly, though there was nothing left of last night's wine to bring up so her strength was spent heaving dry over a chamber pot in the room she no longer shared with Adelaide.

(Not since Paul moved her to the plantation a year ago had she felt the comfort of her sister sleeping beside her. Since her return, Mother had forbidden it, and she knew well enough why.)

She slipped in and out of consciousness to a chorus of furious, frightened whispers. This depravity must not stand; there could be Hell and blood to pay once the Widow de Pointe du Lac rose.

The Widow slept an extra half-hour, to prove a point. It was near eleven by the time she entered Louisa's sickroom, curtly dismissing the maids and drawing back the curtains so the midday sun could stab Louisa's eyes.

_ (Like the foliage of Eden, _ he'd whispered in her ear.  _ Serpent-green as the temptation and sin that had spelled the Fall of Man. Uncover your shame; forget Right and Wrong. Become one flesh, his rib.) _

"Hello, Mama," she said. "Is the doctor on his way?" With his soft hands and searching eyes and lancets for bleeding.

"God, Louisa." The Widow's rings sparkled as she made a fist against her black skirts. "There's no need to call a doctor. We already know what's wrong with you."

"Do you?"  _ Could you tell me? _

"Malaria, no doubt, from sleeping in that filthy air." Her grim smile matched the command in her tone, and something inside Louisa stabbed like broken glass.

"Can we not dispense with the lies?" she heard her own voice say bitter as poison. "I'll be dead soon enough."

The slap rocked her across the heaped pillows. "Never soon enough. 'Soon enough,' and your brother would still be alive."

This had lain between them as heavy as Paul's corpse at the funeral, both of them in mourning blacks--her mother at the gravesite, Louisa turning away from the window. She hadn't been able to bear the cold ceremony of it, and her mother had been caught between railing at her for neglecting her familial duty and a desire to keep the aura of scandal away from the family. 

Louisa hadn't set out to prove her right, but here she was, at the end of the road of grief she'd followed. 

"Have you nothing to say for yourself?" Louisa wanted to sleep, to let the end come, but there was to be no rest. "Have you fallen so far you lack even the dignity to apologize?"

Something cold flowered in Louisa's chest, icy and detached. The very touch of death, left by her blonde angel. None of it mattered anymore. "I thought you might wish to bid farewell to Paul." She carried the last of him, after all. She could feel it.

"Don't you dare claim to be haunted by his ghost. You ruined him. You ruined  _ everything; _ all our hopes--Adelaide's prospects--"

"Our hopes and prospects were lost when Paul went  _ mad!" _ She managed to sit, bracing on shaking arms purely in rage. She would burn this bridge on her way out of this life, leave this unhappy home in flames for spite. "And it was never he who kept them alive in the first place. You never--" she coughed, throat dry, and clutched at her rosary for no reason.

God wouldn't save  _ her _ .

"You never saw what I did for this place."

Mother's face twisted, revulsion drawing her lip up into a sneer. "Thank God I never saw you sink to your natural level. How many men, Louisa? How cheaply did you sell your virtue and name, and when? Was your father's grave yet cold?"

At fifteen, the age Paul had been when he died, Louisa had been untouched; at fifteen she'd worked hard to remain so, despite the dangers and offers and times it would be so much easier. At twenty-four, she'd been the same, despite the way her yearnings had writhed frustrated within her.

At twenty-five--

"I had no virtue to give. Your son took it! He'd have taken everything. Our house, our fields, until we were penniless in the streets. But that never mattered to you. As long as you had father's heir, you could ignore it all. How many times did you close the door? How many times after you realized he was a monster?" She was sweating with the strain of staying upright, her vision blurring and doubling at turns. 

Her mother's face was a mask, cold and dead and white. "I am only glad you will never see him again. Pray that he has the kindness to look down on you as you languish in Hell."

"He always looked down on me, from the time he put me there. Whatever lies after cannot be worse." She rolled to face the open window, letting in more 'filthy air', and felt other filthy things doing their best to kill her.

He'd failed, the first time, to force his way fully inside, but something had broken nonetheless. Her spirit, perhaps. She'd been good,  _ so _ good--never a wrong move, despite her wrong thoughts. Despite how her breath caught at the sight of a slender waist or the feel of a friendly handclasp, she'd have done her duty. But then he'd made  _ himself _ her duty, and she’d fought the second time, hoping for the same miracle. She'd screamed, hoping for a better one, someone to come running.

And after that--

He'd done things to her, with her skirts shoved up and her shoulders pinned. Things he'd learned who-knew-where, or made up, for he hadn't taken the initiation other boys did, with the pleasure houses in town.

Scarlet women, scarlet like the blood in her drawers when all was said and done. Whores of Babylon. How he hated them.

How he loved her, he said during the pain, and she hated herself.

She'd have done her duty, but after it was all over and Paul was dead, head crushed against the stairs in the worst sort of miracle, Louisa had to know.

Would it always have been so dreadful? Was he worse than others, because he was her brother?

Scarlet woman, like his blood on the tiled floor. How he hated them, and what a comfort.

(At least the others didn't hide it, didn't love her, let her numb herself with drink beforehand.)

And her angel's cool fingers had felt like a balm to abused flesh. Her angel's kisses had made her shiver and  _ want _ things, strange things, things she didn't know about either. She wished she'd kissed Babette so, and died from it, back before all was ruined.

Her mother was talking, talking, tearing at her chemise-- _ Make it easier to wash the body _ \--

As though anyone would bother.

_ Uncover your shame _ .

Her shame was deeper than her skin, deeper than the soft folds that were her supposed sin and her only value. She would have left that body if she could, stepped out of it to walk beyond and left the talk of sin and ruin with it.

Her mother had been kind once, she thought, or maybe she had only dreamed it. In the small years before her father's tragic disappearance and Paul's birth. That woman had been kind, and quiet, and they had played games that so often involved hiding. Secrecy. Quiet. Louisa never came out before she was called, and even then. She learned to live in her head, and now it protected her. 

She was alone again, she realized, and found that the knowledge inspired no feelings in her. Not relief, or regret. Only that endless quiet, and those memories wrapping around her. Only the memory of her angel like a star, and the one true grief that she might never see her again.

 

~*~*~* ~

 

The French doors that opened onto the balcony of the stately townhome stood carelessly open to night air, allowing in all manner of dark miasmas.

And besides that, Lestat.

She supposed that her beauty's family couldn't be blamed for thinking the second-story room safe enough from the predators roaming even about the fashionable address. But the entrance beckoned, and Lestat was no Romeo respectful of propriety and held at bay by the mere distance of an easily-scalable wall.

Her love was wrapped as a gift, hidden behind gauzy bed curtains that made art of the dying light entombed within. 

Louisa was even more the portrait of despair, her chest bare and barely rising under the heavy comforter. Even in the muggy air she shivered, beads of sweat forming at her temple. Even an ignorant eye could see she wouldn't last the week. And Lestat had seen her share of death. 

She'd garbed herself for a funeral, wearing a fine dark frock coat in black with blinding white lace, perfect and spotless as no mortal could manage. She'd tied her hair back with black ribbons, the better to highlight the fire in her eyes. Only the best for this one, the poor creature who had found herself, in the grip of hopelessness, pressed against the rough alley brick and torn open. And in that moment, Lestat had loved her utterly and despaired entirely at coming too late to her aid. 

"It's you."

She realized that her love was looking at her, dull and listless in all but her eyes, which followed the shade in the window unfailingly.

_ Such _ eyes; greener than ever in the flickering candlelight. Hungry eyes, taking in every inch of Lestat like a feast.

"You remember, then. I wasn't sure you would." But it seemed foolish, suddenly, to think that she could have forgotten in the swoon, any more than Lestat could. Meant for one another; fashioned to complement.

"Are you here for my soul?" Louisa asked through cracked lips.

"In a way," Lestat replied, pouring a glass of water from the lukewarm pitcher far across the room simply for the pleasure of watching that long column of throat bob with the drink. A little preview, secretly lascivious, and Louisa so charmingly weak that  she allowed Lestat to hold up her head. The bedclothes slipped low.

"Mother sent the priest away, so I'm sure you needn't have bothered personally. I'm well damned."

"Charlatans," she scoffed. "There is no damnation, lovely." She meant it as comfort, her hand tangling in those dark locks, but Louisa's eyes only grew more fevered.

"You know, then. You've seen..." She fell into a cough, her body wracked with the effort of it. 

"More than any of those fools." That was truth enough. At her side Louisa might see the world, all the mysteries outside the choking ignorance of these walls. Given time. "I've come to offer you a choice, my love."

Louisa was looking at her as if she were the whole of the world, and it left Lestat dizzy. What a fine, fierce gaze, even as she lay dying. What a mind, if only she could be freed of dogma. Lestat had failed before, but not now.

She could fix this.

“Choice?” The word sounded foreign on this wing-clipped creature’s tongue. Her skin was moist and tacky; how Lestat hungered to taste it. She climbed with exaggerated inhuman grace onto the mattress, curling herself upon the feather pillows with their embroidered roses.

“A choice to die as you are, or to become more.” More than the most beautiful woman in the world. Louisa rolled with difficulty, slender limbs weighed down by the death Lestat had drawn near, and it was precious. Such a struggle, just to rest in the shelter of Lestat’s body, face towards her and look up through sooty lashes.

She touched that face, that mind, and felt again the yearning below the grief, the deprivation below the loss.  _ This one wanted her.  _ Needed _ her. _

"Would I be..." Her throat worked, dry as a reed, and Lestat pressed closer to hear her; closer still, until their foreheads touched. "Would I be like you?"

"And more," she promised. Louisa would be radiant. "The world will be at your fingertips."

For a moment it was simple as that, and then Louisa's expression shuttered. "I..."

"I'll only ask this once, dearest. Know that. If you say no, you will never see me again. There will be no repenting with your final breaths." 

That sparked panic, bright in the dying woman's eyes. "Don't go!" Her throat constricted, and Lestat could smell the blood seeping through the dry cracks in her muscle and skin. 

"Then tell me your answer. Will you be born anew, or shall this be our last goodbye?"

“I--” full, blue lips trembled, wet still from the water Lestat had fed her. “--would I be alone?” The small hand with its demure oval nails was surprisingly strong, digging into Lestat’s biceps in controlled desperation.

“Of course not, cherie,” Lestat chanced a kiss to moist cheek, another, another, bridge of nose and eyelid and brow, and  _ lips _ , an aching need echoing in her mind. She had known the Hell of being born alone. Never again. “There is no distant, all-seeing master dictating my deeds. I would uplift you for my own selfish reasons, because you are more than you have been.”

"You would stay with me?" She pressed, huddling closer until it seemed they might melt into one being, Louisa's skin blazing with fever against Lestat's dead flesh. 

"Nothing could tear me away. I will be with you always." It was so easy to say such things here in the close dark, desperate to comfort and keep her newfound love. 

"Yes," Louisa breathed against her lips, still shaking--in terror or rapture, Lestat couldn't fathom. Louisa was so unlike her other daughters, lovers, victims. Unlike and identical. "Yes," Louisa said again. "Take me with you. Save me from this uncertainty."

Oh, those words. The beauty they implied. There was so much to prepare, and Lestat impossibly ill equipped. "Save your strength," she whispered, kissing her love once more before withdrawing. It gave her immeasurable strength to see Louisa reaching after her. "Savor this last day, that it might last you through a thousand nights. And then, I will come for you."

 

~*~*~* ~

 

“Ah!”

“There, there, ma belle,” Lestat cooed, cool lips stamping a bloodied kiss mark onto Louisa’s forehead like a blessing. “No need to fear. You’re mine now, and you’ll have forever.”

_ She’d bathed and dressed Louisa more tenderly than maid or mother ever had, turning her this way and that, buttoning and lacing and telling her what a prize she was, how brave, how lovely in this delicate lawn with the pink roses like fever spots on her cheeks. Kisses, caresses, dizzying her already-flagging mind and then they were here, beneath the moon before God and all. _

_ Forever, forever with this wondrous creature, to be close and free and to know the ‘why’ of it all--to be unafraid forever--but the pain-- _

“What--what’s happening?” Louisa gasped, pressing a hand to her abdomen where she felt a twisting in her core.

“I told you,” Lestat replied, stroking her hair and smiling like it was some grand joke. “Your body’s dying. You’ll soon be--”

“You told me it didn’t hurt. You said it would--” A sudden stabbing stole her breath and her words, and Lestat’s golden brows beetled in perplexity.

“It shouldn’t.  Perhaps some discomfort, and then itching.”

Louisa pressed her free fist to her mouth to muffle the cry (old habit); still-growing fangs broke the skin. And between her legs, there spread a gush of wetness.

Lestat’s luminous eyes, somehow possessed of even greater allure now, widened as her nostrils flared. “Ma belle,”  _ (say my name--) _ “what’s wrong?”

“It’s coming.”

_ “What’s _ coming, lovely? Talk sense!” Lestat shook her, hard, every movement and touch magnified a thousandfold like ripples through a still pond.

Louisa laughed then, a brittle sound cut off by a groan; so much for divine, supernatural  knowledge.

“This isn’t--please, are  you ill?” Too rough, but trying to help, impatient and wild-eyed.

“With child,” she gritted out, cutting her bottom lip on a fang as she bit back the pain. She’d suspected when her blood stopped, though she’d not had the pleasure and so how could the female seed have been released? But there’d been no quickening yet, nothing certain. “Or, was--” Death come to her very womb, where she’d carried the surety of her destruction from whichever one of them gave it her.

_ “Child _ \--how in Hell--”

“Hell indeed. The usual way.”

Surely her angel, her devil, would soften then, gather Louisa in slender arms stronger than ten men’s. Surely she’d be soothed--

The loam of the clearing was soft and smelled with the sweetness of decay. Fallen leaves reflected slickly the blue-silver moonlight.

“You didn’t think to  _ mention _ this before?” Such tension, an overwound harpsichord string bound to snap.

“Did it matter? My damnation was not unknown to such as you, surely.”

“Let go of me. Stop--stop cringing. I’m not your damned  _ brother.” _ Revulsion.

“What’s that--” Then Louisa screamed, far from herself, and watched in detached fascination as the massive bloodstain turned her pink dress black in the night. Ruined, obviously; the chemise as well.

Distantly, her own/not hands felt through the passing clumps of tissue, the clotting deadness. She’d need to bathe fully to wash off this blood.

And the tenderness she felt in the wake of empty where full had not even been perceptible frightened her then as nothing else had. Not meant for love, that pulped mass; not for life or care or anything but the evidence of her destruction. Yet… 

Never another chance, then. Never.

That’s what death  _ was, _ and tonight was hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Sexual assault, abuse, dysphoria, incest, self-destructive behavior, self-loathing, miscarriage, slut-shaming


End file.
